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Exterro vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Exterro
Ranking in eDiscovery
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery
Ranking in eDiscovery
1st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Microsoft Security Suite (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the eDiscovery category, the mindshare of Exterro is 4.0%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is 9.0%, down from 27.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
eDiscovery Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery9.0%
Exterro4.0%
Other87.0%
eDiscovery
 

Featured Reviews

PM
IT Analyst III at Federal Credit Union Bank
Automates processes relating to sharing, reviewing, and collecting electronically stored information (ESI)
I think one of the pain points I had was the number of emails that had to be sent out. If there was a way to just maybe reduce the bulk — that would be great. Like I mentioned before, OGC or the General Counsel, they're kind of the business owners of the tool. They're the ones that use it on a daily basis. So one of the things that would be helpful but we just can't do involves the way the role structures are set up. Any time that somebody outside of the Office of the General Council needs something, they need to contact the General Counsel directly in order to get that information from Exterro. I guess as far as a pain point, maybe a more robust role-based access model would be useful. We had to go through a third-party to use it. I understand the risk because you don't want anybody to just go into Exterro and potentially see legal matters, but I think it's just the way we have it set up — it's an all-or-nothing type role-based model. That's why only the General Council can use it. If the roles could be scaled in a way where let's say, a visitor role could come into the tool and view a report, that we can't do right now. So if there was a way to do that, I think that would be nice to have.
Frank Radeck - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, IT Infrastructure & Cloud Technology at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees
Tasks that took an entire day before we implemented the solution now take just 30 minutes.
The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is its ability to search across various platforms, including Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. It enables a streamlined, unified process for searching across these platforms. It is critical for Purview to be able to connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices and data in other SaaS apps. From a support perspective, I can do things while I'm eating lunch or something else. It's more dynamic and responsive. I think everybody appreciates it. We're not tied to one device. Purview's multi-cloud capabilities are also essential for the same reasons. Keeping everything under one umbrella further increases the time savings. Purview accounts for critical regulations from around the world. This is crucial because we hold ourselves accountable to standards and need to align with them. Working at a law firm, we have clients who dictate to us what standards they expect. The visibility is excellent. As we move more things into the cloud, more opportunities exist to put everything under one umbrella.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We like the reporting functionality. It just seems very clean."
"It takes a lot of manual processes out, saves time, and lowers overall organizational risks."
"The machine learning wasn't half bad. I really like that part. I thought it was novel. It pretty much automated it, once you trained the model."
"The speed of it is valuable. I am able to search even 10,000 mailboxes for specific content. It helps search and accommodate the often limited information provided by users regarding what they need."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is the content search. We can use it to find the data we need by searching for keywords, phrases, or the sender or recipient. It helps us gather information from current employees or ones who have left the company."
"The tool has been beneficial. Some of our previous users left the organization without sharing the information they had at a personal level. This information was related to the organization, and they didn't disclose it. Thanks to the product, it's easy for me to search and find out what communication a specific user has done, whether it's from SharePoint or any other platform. With Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, we can easily retrieve and restore this data."
"The return on investment is saving the equivalent of one or two full-time IT department employees and a few hours per week for legal staff."
"Our legal team benefits from using Microsoft Purview eDiscovery."
"I think eDiscovery Premium has made dealing with data from Teams much more accessible than any other platform."
"Tasks that took an entire day before we implemented Purview now take just 30 minutes."
 

Cons

"I think one of the pain points I had was the number of emails that had to be sent out."
"I think one of the pain points I had was the number of emails that had to be sent out. If there was a way to just maybe reduce the bulk — that would be great."
"We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders. It would be beneficial to have more options available for E3 customers. Enhanced Teams functionalities and better capture of text message data, both SMS and MMS, would also be improvements."
"I see two significant challenges with many of my clients. One is that there are some functionality gaps compared to specialized tools in the legal industry, like a legal hold tool or a document review tool. They have features that Purview eDiscovery lacks. Those gaps create a situation where I almost have to do things twice. I need to collect all my data in eDiscovery and ship it to another platform to complete the review."
"Purview Data Loss Protection for remediating policy violations needs refinement, for example, in defining what constitutes a credit card because that is where I get the most false positives."
"We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders."
"Microsoft Purview eDiscovery should be cheaper."
"The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially. While there are options with dropdowns to select criteria, having a natural language feature would be beneficial. Copilot is expected to add such functionality in the future."
"The sorting and filtering of the result data need improvement, and the interface for writing queries is not user-friendly for business users. We still need all the backend stuff. We have to use Graph API to interface with everything and create custom interfaces on the front end to make it easier for the end users, which is costly. The reporting, sorting, and filtering capabilities that other products have aren't available natively in Purview."
"I would suggest adding more platforms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"With the full bundle, pricing is not a significant concern. As an M3, I find the Purview pricing of 1250 per user worthwhile."
"Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comes as part of Microsoft 365 licenses."
"The costs associated with E5 licensing are currently expensive for us, so we use the E3 license, which comes with fewer features and functionalities."
"The pricing and licensing with Microsoft can be complex, and licensing is known to be a challenge because it changes frequently. While the licensing for Purview is not as tricky as other Microsoft products, navigating licenses since the shift to E3 and E5 plans has been a task, as individual licenses must now be purchased separately."
"In the positions that I've had through contracting over the years, I've heard talk of it being overpriced and underperforming compared to its competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Performing Arts
12%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Hospitality Company
8%
Government
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
The setup process was very straightforward. We acquired pricing through our reseller in NASDAQ, eliminating the need to search for prices ourselves.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially. While there are options with dropdowns to select criteria, having a natural language feature would be benefici...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
I sometimes use it for legal holds or to find lost items, and to determine what is going on. However, most of the time, my use case is legal-related.
 

Also Known As

Exterro Fusion
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Allstate, Statoil, AOL, Nike, Citgo, Target, UnitedHealth Group, Microsoft, MetLife, VISA, Oracle, American Express
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Google, Commvault and others in eDiscovery. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.